alohapersona3

> What exactly do you think is stopping such contributions?

2/5 foundation board members are from New Vector. At least another 2/5 foundation board members have strong personal ties with New Vector. 7/8 spec team members are from New Vector. In other words: Nothing at the Matrix Foundation happens without consent from New Vector. If New Vector does not like a competitor, they can block them from participating in the standard (making new features of them standards non-compliant) and then block them from using the Matrix brand or claiming to be Matrix compatible. As a company, you'd be stupid to build your business around being a competitor to New Vector if they can easily throw you out.

That was the whole purpose of the foundation: to manage the spec and the brand independent of New Vector, so that others can contribute.

> I'm not following. How does the foundation having money reduce this risk?

It's much easier to do anything with money. If new structures need to be created in the foundation after a collapse of New Vector, it is way easier to do so if you have money.

> It would change things if they were bringing in millions, but when the community patreon is not even bringing in enough to hire a full time minimum wage employee in California, much less a developer, accountant, or lawyer, documenting the expenditure of a few pennies is pretty low on my priority list.

As I wrote in the linked thread, their total assets exceeded a million dollars end of 2021. That should be enough for a full-time hire with competitive compensation for a few years, especially if that hire is not in California (why the hack hire in California when you don't need to?). Also, even small amounts of money can be very attractive to open source contributors, they're already doing it without any compensation, but just giving them a thousand bucks a month will make them more likely to continue contributing in their spare time. You don't need it to be a full time hire to be effective.

Not entirely. Under the Apache license, everyone can contribute to the Apache-licensed code and mix that code with proprietary code as they wish. Under AGPL-only that's not possible, only code that was contributed under Element's CLA can be relicensed by them and then mixed with the proprietary code. That makes contributing code under AGPL-only less attractive if you need to use the proprietary code.

Why would it be relevant, who I am?

I am interested in the future of Matrix as an open, decentralized protocol. I increasingly see a risk in the behavior of New Vector as the VC-funded effective owner of the Matrix protocol. To me, the Matrix.org Foundation was supposed to be the organization that saves the community from the interests of VCs.

Over recent years I got the feeling the foundation became mostly a fake nonprofit organization to attract donations from the community while the for-profit company attracts VC money. The foundation did not manage to properly include the community in any of its official positions (Board, Spec Team) in 5 years, clearly showing that this is not in its interest.

For Matrix to be a success, we need to design it such that there can be contributions from others than New Vector. This is not happening and because of that, it's very likely that as soon as New Vector is running out of money, Matrix is going to collapse. Having at least a bunch of money in the foundation would reduce that risk, but New Vector seems to even be siphoning off that.

If next there is "Synapse Pro" that is proprietary and sold by Element and includes features not present in the open source version of Synapse but relevant to company or government use of Matrix, the AGPL-only version of Synapse will lack those features. This will hinder companies that (potentially) require "Synapse Pro"-features from contributing to the AGPL-only version of Synapse. We have seen this happen before.